The emergence of mobile devices has created keen interest amongst non-volatile semiconductor memory manufacturers to increase the densities of their devices. Generally, mobile devices do not make use of disk drives, but instead favor use of semiconductor based nonvolatile storage devices. Historically, however, semiconductor storage devices do not have the same storage density as disk drives.
In order to bring the storage densities of semiconductor memories closer to or beyond disk drives, non-volatile memory device manufacturers are developing three dimensional memory technologies. In the case of three dimensional memory technologies, individual storage cells are vertically stacked on top of one another within the storage device. Three dimensional memory devices may therefore provide a mobile device with disk drive like storage density in a much smaller package, cost and power consumption envelope (and even larger systems such as desktop or server systems may benefit from increased semiconductor based non volatile storage densities). However, the manufacture of three dimensional memory devices raises new technology challenges.